Carbon offsets are a scam. John Oliver did a piece on them last year. Lots of it goes to existing forests (which doesn’t help offset new carbon usage) or to the development of mono-culture forests which have all sorts of issues.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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I think the takeaway from that episode is that many carbon offsets are scams, not necessarily all. So don't take corporate claims that they offset their emissions at face value, and consider carefully before you buy offsets.
Take a look at my other comment about Wren and Wendover Productions. (This John Oliver episode happens to include an excerpt from the Wendover piece I mentioned.)
Good to know. Link for the lazy.
I wish there were some effective way to invest in fighting climate change. God knows there's plenty of money invested in the opposite direction.
The way that I’m contributing is my reducing my own usage. I don’t drive a car (electric bike or public transport) I removed the gas supply from my house, signed up with a renewable energy supplier, insulated the ever living shit out of my house including triple glazed glass and installed a Heatpump. Cost a small fortune but I can say I put my money where my mouth is!
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Why? To ease your conscience by claiming that it is not as bad because you paid something extra? It’s the modern version of the selling of indulgences.
It’s worse than doing nothing because it gives the people the illusion that it’s not so bad - while in fact it is exactly as bad.
I am not against easing one's conscience, so long as that's not the only thing people do. It's a perverse turn in our culture that we've started to shame people for trying to act morally. We have a conscience for a reason: to motivate good behaviour. This reminds me of the right's claim that everything is "virtue signalling", as if moral action itself is undesirable. It coheres with a hyper individualistic and self-interested worldview.
My question is precisely whether "in fact it is exactly as bad". That is an empirical claim, not one that you can declare with a serene wave of the hand. That John Oliver reporting is useful in that regards, whereas your comment, devoid of argument or evidence, is not.
Fair enough!
The problem is: Once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, it’s there. It does damage. No money in the world will undo that, unless we build massive factories that extract CO2 from the atmosphere and make coal- or oil-like stuff that we put back in the earth. At the same moment your consumption blasts CO2 out in the atmosphere.
That does not exist. There is no system in place (except for some small but ludicrously expensive labs) that could do that.
Planting trees (or something similar) might help in a few decades, if the trees are still alive then and not being harvested. Until then the CO2 is in the atmosphere, doing its damage. Every day, every minute, every second.
Amen. Carbon offsets are currently being used as a marketing tactic to relieve the conscience of consumers so they wont slow down on their consumption, and keep buying stuff and funding industries that aren't really as critical as they'd like to think they are.
It's an excuse to delay trimming the fat for yet another couple years.
Carbon offsets are scam
I pay for refrigeration destruction, but that's about it. It's strongly verifiable, additional, and as permanent as can be. It's through wren, which seems to be the most strict about credit quality since they removed all the other projects like cooking stoves and tree planting a while back leaving only refrigeration destruction and biochar, which also seems like a quality credit albeit many times more expensive than refrigeration destruction.
That said I don't treat carbon credits as offsets, just an additional charity that I do on top of doing my best to be sustainable, reducing, reusing / repairing, and responsibly disposing of things. At the end of the day you can only do so much individually so the only way to do more is to put some of your extra money somewhere that might do a little extra good.
It's a scam. I've looked into it as part of my climate justice advocacy. There's so so much fraud going on. Sometimes offsets pay for land grabbing of indigenous land even. It's fucked.
You can do your part to lower your carbon footprint by eating the rich, who's status quo has been forcibly thrust upon us and make transitioning to better solutions unfeasible both fiscally and systemically.
Im going to piggy back off this - does anyone know of any reputable carbon capture schemes?
It seems like removing carbon directly should be completely measurable and auditable so we can be sure it's actually having an impact?
In answer to the post - offsets are a scam, even the well intentioned ones often have side effects and the market is set up such that the bad ones get all the money.
I don't think so. There even was an operating one in Saskatchewan Canada, but all it did was send the CO2 through a pipe across the US border for more oil extraction.
So... worse than doing nothing. 👌
Its not currently operating because even that was too expensive to justify.
Does being a plant mom count? My house is like a greenhouse it has so many plants in it. I am the plant equivalent of cheaper by the dozen.
Of course not. I live in America, where we pay corporations to add carbon, thank you very much.
Yup we do. There’s a couple of certification schemes that are decent, but you get what you pay for in offsets. Most aren’t really offset, just planting a tree that’ll disappear in 10 years.
Geological storage of air extracted carbon is the only standard I’d fully trust to genuinely act as an offset. Bloody expensive though.
I used to be a big believer in cooking stoves, but there’s research that shows it becomes an additional stove, not a replacement to open fire cooking. So that ain’t really working then.
I live in the developing world. I would not be quick to trust this kind of institution if I saw it here. In any case, our petrol and power usage is pretty low per capita in Southeast Asia, and the average person doesn't have much disposable income, so I'm not sure it would survive well as an institution or be able to do much. In the West? I guess it depends what their track record is. If it's good, I might be willing.
I am very concerned about climate change though. It's just that I live in a threatened coastal region, and need to spend my money mitigating climate change directly with more expensive construction techniques for flood resistance, not giving it to a charity. I have no choice but to foot the bill, if you guys aren't going to do it. I've estimated this will cost me an extra USD 50k or so over the next 10 years. Of course, most people make less than that here, and just lose their homes. I'm one of the lucky ones.
On a more positive note, our oyster farms do quite a bit of carbon capture. It's becoming a thing!
Individual action cannot be a solution for the climate crisis. The whole idea of individual responsibility for climate impact is the divide and conquer strategy of big business as ultimate form of the collective action problem.
Global actions are the sum of individual actions. Just because one can not safe the world alone, one still should behave like one could.
Nope. Global action is more than sum of individual action. It is meta action that only the collective humanity can do, and not just the time when everyone is doing the same thing, as if that was possible.
And no, you should not behave as if you can solve the climate crisis yourself, because you cannot. Time, money, attention, willpower and empathy are limited resources in people. Of you spend all your personal resources just mitigating your own impact, you will convince yourself that you've done enough when the job is not to curb your personal impact, but to drive cultural and political change that results in global policy that solves the problem. Changing one politicians mind to support pro-climate legislation is far more valuable and impactful than any amount recycling you could ever do.
Further than that, there are emissions done on your behalf that you have no say in; emissions spent on building and maintaining the government that provides services (whether you use them or want them or not), infrastructure that you cannot help but utilise to live your life or military that "protects" (or destroys brown people's homes, it's really a toss up).
Big business has been telling us to recycle for approximately 40 years, and recycling is at an all time low as proportion of total waste produced. Advocating away from meaningful legislation and towards individual action is the ultimate weapon of big business. Recycling, and individual action more broadly, are effectively the same as being stabbed in the abdomen and bleeding to death, and then confidentially pulling out a band aid and putting it onto the gaping wound. I mean, yeah, sure, put it on, it'll absorb some blood, but you, and our planet, are still dying. More decisive collective action, such as calling the ambulance and seeing a team of trauma surgeons asap is necessary.
Yes, I use Wren. The best endorsement I have is from Wendover Productions - after doing a piece on how many carbon offset programs are scams they later said that Wren seems to be better. But that statement did come in a message sponsored by Wren. My hope is that Wendover would not have accepted Wren as a sponsor if they thought it was garbage.
Here is the carbon offsets piece: https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY
Here is a comment from Wendover on their ads for Wren: https://www.reddit.com/r/WendoverProductions/comments/11ubsfu/is_wren_as_good_as_wendover_says/jcnlunq/
Edited to add links
Hmm, that does seem like a perverse financial incentive. I otherwise like some of the content on Wendover Productions, but I remain skeptical about this one.
I would like to see someone post some actual unbiased journalism or scientific studies that support specific carbon offset programs.
Carbon offsets are propaganda at best, but actually intended for large Greehouse Gas emitters to use accounting tricks to ensure they don't have to change anything about their business, and show they are complying with the toothless regulations those same industries lobbied the EPA to ratify.
By even participating in the scam you are perpetuating more climate destruction. If you want to "offset" your carbon footprint, go bomb a pipeline. The amount of disruption you cause will probably offset your entire life's carbon output.
...the idea of a carbon footprint was litteraly invented by oil company heads to push the heat off them and onto us. The very fact that we worry at all about it is playing into their hands
I drive on gas 133km per day, no money left for anything else